his own compan)T, The S treet. com, to a ri- dicwous and unsustainable price on the day of its initial public offering, in 1999. He had played the I. O. game himself: buying shares of semi-worthless compa- nies and "flipping" them after a quick rise on opening day. When other people then did the same thing with his semi- worthless compan)T, he was overwhehned by the absurdity of it. Cramer is a mass of contradictions, cynical and honest at the same time, a candid and original man rising and falling through American cap- italism's giddiest age. Does Cramer's habit of non-stop trading have any special value as an in- vestment strategy? His fund averaged a twenty-four-per-cent return to his in- vestors, after fees, for his fourteen years- much better than the S. & 500 Index's fifteen per cent and the Dow's fourteen per cent. It's a fine performance, but wasn't the thrill and danger at times an end in itself? This may be the one truth Cramer can't bring himself to admit. Other fund managers (George Soros and Julian Robertson,Jr., among them), who worked without bouts of insanity; performed even better; some of those were managers who held stocks for long periods of time, and Warren Buffett, who holds stocks forever, remains the greatest investor of all. Bellicose, self-justifYing, coarse, infan- tile, lovable, and even, at times, saintly, Cramer resembles Dostoyevsky's hero in "The Gambler," who hurls himself at the flames because life without risk wowd be unbearable. For such a personality; losing may offer as great an emotional payoff as winning. Cramer's skill at ex- position and at communicating these emotions is finally more notable than his considerable skill at trading. He is the greatest public generator of excitement and knowledge about the market toda)T. (He stills writes for TheStreet.com and has radio and television shows.) When he perceives something-anything-he experiences an irresistible joy in explain- ing it to whoever will listen. In ten or twenty years, his kind of trading ability will doubtless be replaced by computers, but, as they methodically and quietly pass digits in and out of the market, they will never make us feel anything hke the moment-by-moment terror of big money, and, in Cramer's version, life itself: hanging in the balance. . BRIEFLY NOTED Gowd's Book of Fish, by Richard Flan- agan (Grove; $27.50). This remark- able novel is a meditation on colonial- ism-indeed, on history itself-couched in the story of an English guttersnipe, William Gowd, who is sent to a penal colony in Tasmania in the eighteen- twenties. The book starts like Defoe, with wenching and bar fights. Then, to address the horrors of the colon)T, it shifts toward magic realism; the local surgeon sends the heads of black men, pickled in brine, back to the Royal Society; in London, to prove that Negroes are not descended from Adam. (In this vein, Flanagan also supplies one of the most profound sex scenes in recent literature.) Finally, however, the book resembles only itself: a serene, chilling vision of human life as comparable to the life of fish, "swimming in vast coldness, alone." The Dive from Clausen's Pier, by Ann Packer (Knopf $24). At the start of this quietly engrossing début novel, twenty- three-year-old Carrie Bell is tiring of her stalled life in Madison, Wisconsin, and her bland, relentlessly loving boy- friend of eight years' standing. When a dive into the local reservoir leaves him paralyzed from the neck down, she flees to Manhattan, where she takes shelter with a group of wannabe artists in a de- caying Chelsea brownstone and falls for an elusive older man. The journey is a fa- miliar one, but Packer fleshes it out with a naturalist's vigilance for detail, so that her characters seem observed rather than invented, and capable of mistakes that the author may never have intended. The reswt is genuine suspense, as Carrie feels her way toward the truth about herself: and what it means to be a moral being. Rouse Up 0 Young Men of the New Age!, by Kenzaburo Oe, translated from the Japanese by John Nathan (Grove; $24). A Japanese author, who mirrors this book's author, broods on the life and works of William Blake while writing some episodic fiction that closely resem- bles this novel. The narrator, who has a disabled son, finds his own life and works transformed by Blake, but his in- terpretation of Blake also changes as his personal circumstances change; the same is true of his son's hilarious utterances. This elegant work is a mordantly enter- taining reflection on the uses of litera- ture and imagination; alert readers may be inspired to apply its lessons to the text at hand. Unless, by Carol Shields (HarperCollins; $24.95). Reta Winters-loving help- meet to a doctor, mother of three cheer- fill daughters, and author of a successfill comic novel-has always considered herself happy, even blessed. Then her eldest child, nineteen-year-old Norah, briefly disappears and resurfaces as a panhandling mute on a Toronto street corner, holding up a homemade plac- ard that says "Goodness." Shields's abil- ity to use Reta's darkest fears to reveal the order lurking in chaos, without ever losing her light touch (Laurie Col- win comes to mind), is nothing short of astonishing. Dreams of a Robot Dancing Bee: 44 Stories, by James Tate (Vërse; $23). Like forty-four test tubes, these stories con- tain a series of meticwously prepared chemistry experiments. In most, two disparate characters reswt in a highly unstable compound, producing a fizz, a moral insight, and a sense of personality as destin)T. A wife realizes that her hus- band is craZ)T. A husband realizes that his wife is craz)T. A closet boxing fanatic de- cides to run off to Egypt with a sexy young boxing fanatic. Whatever the dys- function, Tate, the long-acclaimed poet, uses a disarmingly pedestrian voice to lure the reader to a place of bizarre poi- gnangr. He makes eccentricity look good, as a poet showd THE NEW YOR.KER, MAY 20, 2002 113